Part video work, part installation, ENEMIES! at TCB Gallery is a send up of the Melbourne arts scene that’s as funny as it is true. I’ll admit, when I first walked into TCB and saw two coffins, my expectations plummeted. Death of the artist, death of creativity, death of art were the first things that crossed my mind. The computer, perhaps too reminiscent of those I’ve spent my career working on, did not beckon me in. I turned away and took a look at Emma Nicole Berry’s a week long waiting room, filled with colour and images and prose before contending with Brunswick's own corporate hellscape. 

To launch the new Lowbrow Art Book Club (tentatively titled Bottom Shelf, but we’re taking suggestions), which will be coming to you all on the last Tuesday of every month, I couldn’t think of a better exhibition to see this week than A Library of Libraries at Blindside. My first time at the gallery’s new North Melbourne location, I was welcomed in by the curator Grey Dear, and shown around the show that is a collection of collections. I wasn’t able to make it on opening night (like Charlotte was), but snuck in a day earlier to spend some time in the space reading a few of the many books on display.

As I enter the singular room of Craft Victoria and grab an exhibition sheet under the white spotlights,  my first instinct is to look at the artworks poking out of the ground. The annual show Fresh!, which has been running for 33 years, opened on Valentine’s Day at Craft Victoria. Like a geographical map, many of the works are spread out on the ground. I keep my head down; I’m an explorer that needs to make my way through the jungle of metal and glass. The artworks are either directly on the floor or lay on rustic wooden tables, and the one-dimensional works are attached without framing onto the wall. They are all interacting with the space given to them, directly in contact with either the floor or the wall. I feel like the curation strongly mirrors the common conveyed ideas of the eight graduates in the exhibition. The works are all revolving around connection; either between different materials, or within family, traditions, and queer communities.

George Paton Gallery is currently hosting two solo shows; Translucences by Soyo Paek and Purity and Danger by Leena O’Luu. The gallery, situated in the University of Melbourne’s Arts and Culture building at the Parkville campus, is run by the university’s student union (UMSU). Work is chosen via a proposals process and only current Uni Melb students can apply. George Paton gallery fills a strange niche at the university, in that it doesn’t feel like a student gallery, and that it’s so separate from UniMelb’s Southbank VCA campus - which is where all of the creative arts students are situated. George Paton feels more aligned with the professional side of the university, rather than the student side, even though it’s definitely student work on display.

Blindside is a mainstay of the Melbourne art scene. We’ve covered it multiple times from the inception of Lowbrow. The gallery found a home in the Nicholas building for years, and has recently bade farewell to the space, with its big windows and temperamental elevators, and moved to 54 Errol Street - a City of Melbourne owned shopfront in North Melbourne. The new space is long and narrow; it clearly had a former life as a family home attached to a shopfront. It's a space that calls for creativity in exhibition design in order to make full use of the long hallways and somewhat incongruous spaces. Chokehold was the inaugural exhibition: a one day photographic show, with a panel discussion and, of course, a peep show in the new back garden. This show is also a return and a goodbye for Sherburn - part of the Blindside team for many years, who stepped away at the end of last year. In their own words: “I’m very confident in how this is really the much needed future step for such a significant, heritage form of an artist-run space.”

I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never been to Off The Kerb before. The pay to play gallery model that Off the Kerb and other galleries like it use (PG Printmaker, fortyfivedownstairs, Brunswick Street Gallery, SOL) has perplexed me since I was in art school; not quite a commercial gallery, not quite an ARI, but a secret third thing that hovers between the two. Yet, they do hold an important place in the community for those ready to exhibit their work, but not in the stable of a commercial gallery. Their current exhibition, Summer Daze, is under the umbrella of Midsumma festival - Melbourne’s LQBTQIA+ arts and culture festival that plays out across the city through January and February.

I snuck into SOL Gallery just as the opening for SOULS was wrapping up. Group Show SOULS is on as part of Midsumma Festival 2026, which, as they put it, is Victoria’s premier festival of LGBTQIA+ arts and culture. I struggled to find info about how involved Midsumma was in the show, or if this show has been presented by SOL Gallery specifically. I couldn’t see who curated the show. Or even how these artists came to be involved; was it invitational or via submission? But at the end of the day the details don’t matter. As this was a stellar line up featuring a range of LGBTQIA+ artists that together present a show that celebrates queer identity and community, and feels joyful in doing so. As such, it feels a fitting part of the Midsumma festival.

The current show at Assembly Point has been curated by Lani Seligman & Kiron Robinson, and it moves in relative silence. Heralded by the title of the show ‘masterpiece’, the artists, and curators are named, but no other information is present on the scene. The works themselves aren’t credited individually, there’s no exhibition text, and there’s nothing online I could find about the show. After being initially frustrated about this, as it’s admittedly a bit hard to write about art when you know nothing about it, I came round to liking the lack of information (although I did message one of the artists eventually, just to find out whose work is whose). It allows the work to speak for itself, and feels more like public art than any formal kind of exhibition. 

When I went to Unassigned to have a poke around the In The Making show by Many Hands Make, a pot luck lunch was being packed up. A long table set up in the middle of the gallery was draped in tablecloths and showed the evidence of a meal shared between friends. I’m so enamoured with how many community events are hosted at Unassigned and how eager the community is to connect with these events. From meals like this potluck, to admin monday which turns the gallery into a co-working space, to fundraisers like Lesbian Mud Wrestling, or the weekly life drawing sessions that are about to start back up. Unassigned is such an important part of the emerging artist community and shows like In The Making prove that even further. 

Round 2 of the RMIT grad shows left a lot to be desired. For whatever reason, most works felt like I had seen them before, not in the sense that they felt warmly familiar, but that I was being shown the same exhibition time and again. I’ll also admit I had higher expectations for this post-graduate exhibition. I generally liked most of the work, but not much of it jumped out to me as favourites. Lots of it blended into each other. This could be due to grad show fatigue of sorts? Seeing so much graduating student work in such a short amount of time, it’s impossible to not compare it all to each other. 

The thing that stuck out to me about the 2025 VCA grad showwas theswathes of space each artist had. Some had whole walls, others had whole rooms. It definitely seemed like each grad had probably about four times the amount of room that each of the RMIT students had in their recent grad show install. I heard through the grapevine (gossiping with other ex-students I ran into) that the painting department only had 20 graduating students this year, in comparison to 35 last year. Considering the starting cohort sits around 40 students, this is a huge drop out rate. This is a trend across all departments (although painting definitely has the biggest difference in numbers), which makes me wonder why exactly the drop out rate was so high for the class of 2025.

I went into the MADA Grad Show with no expectations. The campus is foreign to me, I don’t know any of the grads, and the people I know who go to Monash are in the music department. I was blown away. Given all the artists are BFAs or Honours, and my somewhat chaotic experience of the RMIT show, I expected a similar experience- in fact I skipped out on opening night in the hopes of avoiding chaos. I regret that, and will not be making the same mistake again. The show feels almost airy. Each artist has space to breathe, the building is gorgeous, with ample light and wooden floors. With limited exceptions, each artist felt like they had taken full advantage of their time at art school, producing works that felt like the full culmination of an undergrad. 

The opening night of the RMIT grad show was sticky, heaving, and a good reminder that my clubbing days are behind me. Bec and I trekked to Swanston street twice to view it, once in all its opening night chaos, and then the next morning for a more relaxed, albeit agenda driven visit. 

I’d be lying if I said attending the RMIT Grad Show opening was an enjoyable experience. It would’ve been an awesome party for the graduates whose work was on show, surrounded by their friends, family and fellow students. But as a punter it was not- it was hot, we were shoulder to shoulder packed like sardines in some rooms, and there was so much art on display that it became overwhelming. Charlotte and I had to leave after seeing about half the work and come back the next day to be able to actually take anything in. Although the amount of graduating student work was overwhelming, the sheer number of pieces on display allowed lots of it to fade into the background and that allowed my favourites to stand out to me.

Limitless Play is the group show currently on at No Vacancy. The title does not disappoint; the show is full of joyful, playful work that feels a bit like a party. The work feels whimsical yet well matched, with a cohesive visual style that works well together from all five artists. I imagine the opening would’ve been even more of a party with live music and movement performances over two nights, as well as a magazine launch (HOISZN issue 007) in the space on a third night. Also notably drinks sales on Performance Night and from the HOISZN launch event, plus some merch sale revenue (totalling $550 so far!) is to be donated directly to the Victorian Aboriginal Child and Community Agency. This is admirable, especially when considering the whopping gallery hire fee which totals over $2k per week, in addition to the 20% commission No Vacancy takes on artwork sales. I didn’t manage to make opening night or any performances for this show, but maybe that’s for the best considering Charlotte’s dry cleaning bill after the red wine incident at the last opening Lowbrow attended at No Vacancy.

Now in its third year, Ants at Unassigned Gallery feels like a cornerstone of their calendar, the embodiment of the community focused gallery in Brunswick. The show is one in a number of small works exhibitions either on or coming up on the Melbourne arts calendar at the moment, though this iteration of the genre feels distinctly community minded, as most shows at Unassigned do. The show runs the gamut of genre, medium, and style, though there are a few recurring themes (namely the titular insect). With the smallest work measuring at just centimetres, it’s an exhibition that firmly shows you size isn’t everything, and that even the smallest works can pack a punch. The show is massive - 183 artists - but not unruly. The size made me focus on the details, in which I was too wrapped up to be bogged down by the sheer number of works on display.

Days are getting shorter (false), trees are changing colour (in full bloom), and there’s a chill in the air (depends on the day: it is Melbourne). Lies though these all may be, down Tyler Street in Preston there’s an art exhibition that could convince you it just might be true. With just eight artists in the show, this exhibition takes up the interior window space of Video Days, a vintage movie store trading in nostalgia. 

I ducked out of the rain earlier this week to check out Holly Goodridge’s The Shape of Rest at Mailbox Art Space. The show fills nineteen repurposed wooden mailboxes in the foyer of Pawson House on Flinders Lane in Melbourne’s CBD. Mailbox Art Space is a hidden secret for those who know about it, and I love being able to share it with friends who would otherwise walk past the unassuming building. I’ve written about Goodridge’s work previously, as part of the Convergence group show at Blindside and I’m so glad to be able to revisit her work in a place where it’s not competing for space against the rest of a student exhibition.

Personally, I’ve been a longtime Hillvale Photo fan. I've been dropping my film to be developed by the team there for years - since they had a lil’ tiny shop on a slightly different Brunswick back street from where they now operate their much larger lab and gallery. The Photo Trophy is Hillvale’s annual photography competition, where they print and display all entries in a salon style hang that completely fills the walls of their gallery space. There’s something to be said for a gallery that only showcases one particular art form, and especially photography, which so often gets overlooked in group shows.

This is my first time writing a review for a show, thank god its someone I know! Harmonising With My Kitchen Fan is a group show curated by Iona Mackenzie, featuring herself, Madeleine Minack, and Hayley Does at Oddany Gallery in Brunswick. I always love coming into Oddany, I love the drapes, high ceilings and candles scattered about, it is a character in its own right.